John Kenneth Galbraith

"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions. "

"Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next. "

"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. "

"Few people at the beginning of the ninteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted. "

"Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all. "

"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. "

"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. "

"In economics, the majority is always wrong. "

"In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof. "

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought. "

"Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative. "

"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything. "

"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue. "

"Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. "

"One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know. "

"People fo privilage will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. "

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. "

"Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks. "

"The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor. "

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. "

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. "

"The salary of the chief executive of the large corporations is not an award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm gesture by the individual to himself. "

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. "

"Washington is a place where people praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations. "

"Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive. "

"Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will. "

"You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too. "